DIONYSUS (Διώνυσος, Διόνυσος). — A Greek divinity: “the god of ecstasy and terror, of frenzy and enthusiastic intoxication, the mad god whose appearance drives men mad.”
Scholars disagree on the localization of his homeland. After the invalidation of the etymology of D.’s name proposed by Kretschmer—which had constituted the main element of the theory—Thrace, Phrygia, and Lydia, or both together, have been discarded, especially considering the improbability of correctly identifying Semele, mother of D., as a Phrygian or Thraco-Phrygian earth goddess (here too, etymological arguments, among others, have proven inconsistent). It does not seem bold to propose considering Greece itself as the place of origin (according to Thucydides [2, 15, 4], the Anthesteria belonged to the Ionians even before their migration), where the cult of the god, already fully known to Homer—though he shows the same reserve toward him as toward Demeter—originated among the lower classes of the population, and thus perhaps from the non-Aryan stratum. But whether Greek or not, the important point is that, as soon as literary and figurative monuments begin to speak, D. and all that pertains to him are expressed in distinctly Greek forms, and that at a certain moment “the greatest and most beautiful things, from a spiritual and aesthetic point of view, that classical Elis produced, were produced under the influence and with the seal of D.” From him, as F. Nietzsche has shown, tragedy originates (παρωδία, from πράγμα, as the actors were called in theatrical performances: cf. M. P. Nilsson, *Der Ursprung der Tragödie*, in *N. Jahrb. f. Klass. Alt.*, 27 [1911], pp. 609 ff., 673 ff., 687).
The same uncertainty that surrounds the origin of the god is encountered by anyone seeking to unify the figure of D., whom Plutarch called πολυετής καὶ πολύμορφος, and to determine his precise role in myth and cult: the action of D. is practically limitless, and to confine him to one sphere rather than another is merely to lose sight of the meaning of his figure, to betray what the Greeks thought of him. D. and the Dionysian spirit permeate every aspect of the spiritual and material world; mysteriously, he stands at the roots of being, comprehending in his nature all that belongs to being, he is being itself, a paradoxical synthesis of contraries in which finite and infinite, distinct and indistinct are submerged. D. is equally present and absent, near and far, exultant and afflicted; he appears as both the giver and the taker of life, as belonging to this world and the next, and in his myths, “as in the purest art and purest poetry,” the possible and the impossible, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual are blended. Without need of particular exegesis, by listening to his mythologems and examining the cultural practices that are their practical reflections, it is not difficult to grasp the intimate essence of D.
He is the son of a god (Zeus) and the Theban Semele (Iliad, 14, 323), a mortal woman who gives birth to an immortal son (Hesiod, *Theog.*, 940 ff.): D. πράγμα βροτοῦν (Iliad, 14, 325). The mother, for having desired to see her spouse “in all his celestial splendor,” is incinerated by his lightning; Zeus takes the unripe fetus, sews it into his thigh, and brings it to birth after carrying it to term (Pindar, frg. 85; Herodotus, 2, 146; Euripides, *Bacchae*, 94 ff., etc.). D. himself will later descend to the Underworld to bring his mother up to the sky of the Olympians: Semele will later receive divine honors in Greece (cf. Plutarch, *Quaest. gr.*, 12, p. 293 C; Hesiod, *Theog.*, 942). The duality of the god’s nature, already evident in the myth of his birth to a mortal and an immortal, is even more striking in the “epiphany” of the god: D. is characterized by the mask, normally foreign to the Olympians (a mask was used only in the cult of Artemis Orthia), and which is a symbol of dual personality. The contradiction persists in the fact that D. is associated with unrestrained joy, the noise with which he impetuously takes possession—in a word, the orgy—but also with terror and the silence of death. The epithet βρομίως (cf., e.g., Aeschylus, *Eumenides*, 24; Pindar, frg. 73) indicates his characteristic noisiness; Euripides (*Bacchae*, 141) reveals the joy, the need to dance that even his mother Semele feels while carrying him in her womb, and the marvels that attend his appearance are recounted by Pausanias (6, 26, 1), Diodorus (3, 66), Pliny (*Nat. hist.*, 2, 31), and others, while characteristic of his seizure is the symbolic marriage of the statue of D. with the wife of the king archon in Athens, which took place during the Anthesteria (cf. Aristotle, *Athen. pol.*, 3, 5). The basilinna, assisted by fourteen handmaidens (γέραμα), secretly sacrificed in the temple of D. in the Λίμναι, and in the evening lay with the statue of the god in the βοθκόλιον of the king archon. Many myths also speak of the ruin that coincides with the appearance of the god (e.g., Iliad, 6, 132 ff.; Apollodorus, 3, 37; Plutarch, *Quaest. gr.*, 38). And just as D. in his beneficent aspect is called Λύσιος, Λυκίος, in his maleficent aspect he bears the epithets Ἀνθρωποφάγος, Ἀμάθιος, and his terror spreads especially among women who, clad in the fawnskin or the *nebris*, form his retinue (Maenads, Bacchae, Thyiads) and are driven to tear apart their children or the young animals they had just suckled. This is the phenomenon of Ἰωμόσχισα:
---
Waters: hence the names Πελάντος, Ἀκτάτος, Λυκίνος, Λιμναγενής. In the moist element over which D. presides lies the creative force (cf. Augustine, *Civ. Dei*, 7, 21), which is clearly expressed by the phallus (D. Φαλλήν, and there were phallic processions in honor of the god) and by the bull (D. Βουγενής). But if generation resides in moisture, water is also a feminine element (“aqua femina,” Varro, *Ling. lat.*, 5, 61), and D. is always surrounded by a retinue of women. “Nymphs nurse and rear the child D. and accompany the adult god” (cf. Homeric Hymn, 26), and the participants in his dances are called “nurses” (τὰ βύλλα, Iliad, 6, 132): D. himself has something feminine in his nature (ὁ γάμος: Aeschylus, frg. 61; cf. Euripides, *Bacchae*, 353; Arnobius, 6, 12; Firmicus Maternus, *De err.*, 6, 7), something that leads him to pour out his love, a love altogether feminine, upon Ariadne, who thus links him to the Minoan world and shares his nature, similar in its contradictions to the entire world surrounding D.: a world of life and death, as D. himself is life and death. For D. dies (at Delphi his tomb is even shown), as seen in the myth of D. Zagreus, in which the god is torn apart by the Titans just as his sacrificial victims—the kids and fawns—are torn apart in the arms of the Maenads. The connection with waters further justifies the mantic motifs attributed to D., who, in union with Apollo, gave the system of inspired divination to the oracle of D. (v. DELPHI, oracle of).
### Mysteries of Dionysus
The cult of Dionysus also had a mystery organization (v. Mysteries). This aspect, which recalls mystical motifs, attests to the god’s great antiquity. It is known that Dionysus was invoked during the Lenaean Agones (cf. scholion to Aristophanes, Frogs, 479: καλῆτε δέον the priest would say, to which the assembled would respond Σεμελῆι "Ἀκῆτε πλουτοδότα"), by order of the dadouchos, one of the priests of the Eleusinian Mysteries (v. MISTERIO). Dionysus would thus belong, in this case, to the mystery cult of Demeter, and his rite consisted of dramatic representations. Elsewhere as well, for example at Lerna in the Argolid (cf. Pausanias, 2, 30, 2), at Sicyon (id., 2, 11, 3), and at Patras (id., 7, 19 ff.), there is evidence of a mystery cult of Dionysus, whether connected with Demeter or not. Moreover, there are countless private mystery cults, especially from the Roman period, in which the figure of Dionysus is involved; among these are the Bacchanalia.
Outside these festivities, the god occupies a central role in Orphism (v. MISTERIO), whose theology and asceticism would exert considerable influence on Greek philosophical speculation, particularly on Plato.
---
### Dioscorus, Saint, Martyr
Son of a Christian reader in Cynopolis (Upper Egypt) and a tax collector, he was arrested by the city’s curator for refusing to sacrifice to the gods and to surrender the sacred books. He was sent to Alexandria, where the Roman prefect Culcianus imprisoned him for a long time. When brought to trial and seen to remain steadfast in the Christian faith, Culcianus subjected him to various tortures three times, to which Dioscorus showed himself insensible through an ecstatic rapture, and finally had him beheaded (305 or 306). During the tortures, he did nothing but pray for the conversion of his executioners. So states the Passio. His feast is celebrated among the Latins on May 18 and among the Greeks on October 13.
The cult of Dioscorus has nothing to do with the pagan cult of the Dioscuri, since his Passio (not later than the early sixth century) is reliable in its fundamental structure.
---
### Dioscorus I
Patriarch of Alexandria from 444 to 451, died in exile at Gangra in Paphlagonia on December 4, 454. Little is known of Dioscorus’s life before his episcopate, except that he was archdeacon to his predecessor, St. Cyril, and accompanied him to the First Council of Ephesus (431).
From St. Cyril he inherited a profound horror of the Nestorian heresy, which he took to extremes and drove him to cling exclusively to certain Christological formulas of his master that were susceptible to misunderstanding and did not accord with those of the ancient Orientals or of the Latin West. Under the pretext that St. Cyril favored the formula “one incarnate nature of the divine Word,” Dioscorus condemned those who maintained that there were two natures in Jesus Christ, δύο φύσεις. From such intransigence, which St. Cyril himself did not know, all his misfortunes arose. When Eutyches, condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 448, appealed to him, Dioscorus took up the cause of the obtuse monk and, in agreement with the eunuch Chrysaphius, arranged for Emperor Theodosius II to convoke an ecumenical council to review the case. Everything was prearranged to secure the rehabilitation of the Constantinopolitan archimandrite at the council that met at Ephesus in 449. For his conduct there, which he had ensured he would preside over, V. CHALCEDON (Second Council of); EPHESUS, LATROCINIUM OF. At Ephesus, Eutyches was declared orthodox and those “dyophysites” who affirmed the two natures in Christ were condemned.
As a result of this decision, Dioscorus became the father of Monophysitism—not the crude Monophysitism known as the “cutichianism” that dissolved the Savior’s humanity into the Godhead like a drop of water in the ocean, but the verbal Monophysitism that would later give its name to Severus of Antioch, who, enslaved entirely to formulas, opposed the terminology canonized by the Council of Chalcedon.
Dioscorus’s triumph after the “Robber Synod” of Ephesus was short-lived. In October 451, a new ecumenical council was held at Chalcedon, convoked by Emperor Marcian. Before reaching the city, the Fathers held a preliminary meeting at Nicaea, where Dioscorus, in agreement with some Egyptian bishops, dared to excommunicate Pope St. Leo. Such an act, along with other misdeeds, was reproached to him at the third session of the Council of Chalcedon (October 10, 451), which he refused to attend, and it led to his deposition. The sentence was confirmed by Emperor Marcian, who additionally exiled him to Gangra, where he died.
Dioscorus seems to have written little; only a few letters and fragments of letters survive in Syriac and Armenian translations. A long funeral oration attributed to Macarius, bishop of Tkou in Egypt, is not his, or at least has been heavily interpolated. Also apocryphal are the Memoirs of Dioscorus, of which fragments remain.